


Hands and Hearts and Voices

by SylvanWitch



Category: James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: Alternate Meeting, Canon-Typical Violence, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hurt James Bond, Hurt/Comfort, Infidelity, M/M, Skyfall References, Slow Burn, not-quite-enemies to friends to lovers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-03
Updated: 2020-01-03
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:02:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22105249
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: James Bond is not an easy man to love.  Q is a hard man to shake.  Eventually, they make it work.
Relationships: James Bond/Q
Comments: 38
Kudos: 263
Collections: 00Q





	Hands and Hearts and Voices

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, the title is taken from the "Kellerman's Anthem" of _Dirty Dancing_ fame. What of it? *grins*
> 
> This satisfies the "Are you talking to me?" square on my personal prompts bingo card. It was supposed to be a short little story. You can see how that worked out.

“Are you talking to me?” 

He asks it sincerely, donning the mildly befuddled, middle-aged professor mien he sometimes uses to appear innocuous and slightly pathetic.

It usually works.

This time, the guy with the earpiece doesn’t buy Bond’s ruse.

Raking him with a look worthy of a naval broadside (which is to say: potentially fatal but generally just damned uncomfortable to undergo), the tall young man with a flop of brown hair on his forehead and piercing hazel eyes—rolling at him, Bond notices—says, “Just a moment, J., I have to ditch a dinosaur”—and taps his ear, bringing his full and pointed attention to bear on Bond.

If the kid thinks his sneering superiority is going to unsettle Her Majesty’s most dangerous blunt instrument, well, he’s clearly not as smart as he pretends to be.

“It’s called Bluetooth,” the kid says, ostentatiously enunciating each syllable in the slightly raised voice of one dealing with hard-of-hearing elders or simpletons.

It’s even money to which category he’s resigned Bond.

“It’s called not touching your ear when you’re talking. Are you afraid it’s going to fall out?” Bond _doesn’t_ roll his eyes—he has too much savoir faire for that—but he does smirk, the patented you’re-never-so-clever-as-right-before-I-kill-you look he’s known for.

In certain circles, it’s enough to make a grown man wet himself.

This one doesn’t, but, Bond suspects, it’s because he’s not actually grown.

“The earpiece? Unlikely. I designed it myself.”

“I was speaking of your brain, actually,” Bond clarifies.

At this, the kid bridles, sour expression crossing his face. He takes a few steps closer, into Bond’s personal space.

It would be more threatening if he weren’t wearing an anorak that makes him look like he’s wandered off from his nursery school on a day trip to the museum.

This close, Bond can see that the young man has a smattering of gold freckles constellating his china doll complexion. His lips are red—bitten, Bond surmises—his eyes a starburst of moss-green swirls rayed with golden brown.

He smells vaguely of marigolds and something spicy.

Suddenly, Bond is less interested in putting the young man in his place than getting him into bed.

It’s an uncharacteristic reaction. Despite Bond’s legendary sexual appetites, he’s typically more cautious on his home ground.

And there is still the issue of the earbud.

Then it occurs to him that only drunks and lunatics front him so boldly, even in his absent-minded don mode. Except when he’s trying to be charming, Bond exudes a don’t-fuck-with-me aura that is almost pheromonic.

(“You have resting murder face,” Moneypenny had once observed.)

In the seconds it takes Bond to realize he may have underestimated his opponent in this battle of wits, the young man offers a smile completely devoid of warmth and says, “I could kill you with these,” waggling his thumbs, “before you left the gallery.”

If the boy intends to unsettle Bond, he succeeds, though perhaps not in quite the way he’d meant.

Bond isn’t threatened—he’s kenned the young man’s identity now, of course, and damn M for her fondness for awkward matches.

No, he’s not afraid of Q.

He’s aroused—more immediately and painfully aroused than he has been in a good long while.

It’s…extremely compelling.

Without so much as a shift in his breathing, Bond curls one corner of his mouth, makes a slow survey of the young man, from that mop of ridiculous hair to the tips of his faddish trainers.

When he drags his eyes back up the slender length, Bond’s only a little surprised to see Q’s eyes alight with challenge rather than alarm or contempt—both more self-preserving expressions, surely.

Something tells him this isn’t a man who backs down from a fight, even if he looks like he couldn’t go one round with a barmaid, never mind a cool-handed killer like Bond.

“Drink?” he asks and is answered with an insouciant shrug.

“If I must.”

“Don’t put yourself out on my account, Q,” Bond goes on, smirking.

“Wouldn’t dream of putting myself anywhere for you, Bond.”

And that’s when Bond knows he’s in real trouble.

  
*****  
  


He’s in worse trouble not too much later, and he doesn’t have Q to blame for it.

Through numb lips Bond recounts, in terse words, what happened at his ancestral manse. He can’t think the name—or hers—without shivering.

Wearing a face like stone, Bond attends the memorial, his suit the only proper thing about him. In his head, Bond’s imagining explosions, torn bodies, eyes that go cold as the overcast sky reflected in a Scottish tarn.

He can’t get his hands warm.

He brushes by Q on the sidewalk near the cemetery. There’s too much warmth in Q’s eyes, too much color in those pale cheeks.

When a slender, gloved hand on his arm stops him, Bond hears his back teeth creak in protest as he resists the urge to slam his fist into that beautiful face.

“Let go,” he says, calmly, he thinks, given the maelstrom in his guts.

“No.”

Like it’s simple. Like Q has any claim over Bond. Like he has the right…

Bond rakes him with an ugly look, but Q doesn’t move his hand.

“Let me drive,” and it’s somehow an order that Bond can’t seem to disobey. As if it belongs to another body, he watches his hand come up and drop the keys into Q’s free hand.

They end up at a down-at-the-heels pub, the kind of small, neighborhood place where working class regulars make up most of the business.

The bar-rail is scuffed, the leather stool-tops cracked, but the ale that Q insists on ordering them is good, the other patrons quiet, and despite himself, Bond feels himself thawing, the first slender tendrils of tomorrow threading through his veins.

He doesn’t want to have any hope left. He’s done with caring.

Apparently, Q didn’t get the memo.

“Come home with me?” Q asks after a half-hour of companionable silence.

Bond is surprised to discover that that’s not what he wants, and he shakes his head.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Not for _that_ ,” Q corrects him, sounding prim. “You shouldn’t be alone.”

There’s no pity in Q’s voice, but there is compassion, and Bond isn’t sure he can take gentleness right now.

He grinds his molars and shakes his head again. “No.”

For the second time in their brief acquaintance—a period marked mostly by disaster—Q gives him that Gallic shrug.

“I’ll come to yours, then,” he answers, as if Bond had invited him.

They end up on Bond’s disused couch watching Swedish slow TV. Once in a while, Q will lean in, pressing his shoulder to Bond’s, and then sit back again, as if he hasn’t made an overture.

The third time it happens, Bond puts his arm around Q’s shoulder. Q fits in the curve of Bond’s body like he belongs there, and Bond feels a little more of the ice at his core melt away.

It’s only a matter of time before the flood, he thinks, panic a blue flutter under his diaphragm.

“You should go,” he says, after another quarter hour has passed.

“No,” Q answers again.

Bond isn’t used to not getting what he wants, unless it’s the things that really matter. Those he doesn’t get to have—or, at least, get to keep.

The flutter turns into a churning.

“I can’t—” He’s not sure what follows, but he’s spared the embarrassment when Q says, “It’s alright, James. Just breathe.”

Q spends the night on Bond’s couch, feet in Bond’s lap, head at an awkward angle on the far arm.

Bond doesn’t sleep, but he finds Q’s breathing a strange comfort, and somehow the night isn’t so long when it’s shared.

The next morning, Q is up bright and early making coffee on the machine Bond had never quite mastered.

“Are you doing a photo shoot for H&G?” he asks as Bond pads in, barefoot, from the shower.

Bond looks at him.

“This kitchen is immaculate. Do you ever cook in it?”

It’s Bond’s turn to shrug, though it feels somehow less elegant coming from him. “I’m not here much.”

“Ah, yes, well there is that.”

Since Bond’s not the sort to stick around for the awkward morning-after small talk, he feels a bit at sea, especially as there really was no night before to speak of.

“Do you eat breakfast?” Q softens the implied criticism in the question with a smile. Bond finds himself smiling back, though the muscles in his face feel stiff from lack of practice.

Bond nods at a cupboard to the right of the sink, which Q opens to reveal a box of muesli.

“Right. Well, we’ll pick something up on the way in then, shall we?”

He sounds so certain that Bond is coming back to work with him: It sets off alarm bells in Bond’s hindbrain.

“Did M—the _new_ M—put you up to this? Am I your mission, Q? Seduce me into returning, get me back whatever it takes?”

“You think a lot of yourself, don’t you?” Q answers. There’s something of a challenge in his tone, something amused and superior. It rankles.

Bond grits his teeth and refuses to rise to the obvious bait.

“Answer the question.”

“The one about me being a whore for the home office? That one?”

Bond shakes his head. “Get out,” he says wearily, turning his back on Q, which might be intended as an insult—implying that Q isn’t dangerous enough to worry about—or might be a compliment—Bond trusts him not to stab him in the back.

Again, a hand stops him, this one on his bare shoulder. He cannot stop a shiver, Q’s hand hot on his cool skin.

“I wasn’t _sent_. This has nothing to do with work.”

Bond has a hard time imagining a life in which there is even a single element not related to work. His life has been nothing but work; he was made for it, and he’ll die in the service of it.

There must be something of that awful resignation in his eyes when he pivots beneath Q’s touch, snatching his hand and turning it with only enough torque to cause a mild twinge. 

Q’s eyes when they meet his are sad; if he cares that Bond is threatening to break his wrist, he doesn’t show it.

“Your life matters, James.”

Bond wants to protest that they don’t know each other nearly well enough for Q to call him by his first name, and then he remembers the night before, his near panic, Q’s quiet voice grounding him in his warm presence.

And that he doesn’t know Q’s real name at all.

“If you’re going to insist on given names, you’ll have to tell me yours.”

It’s a calculated risk. Part of him hopes Q’s natural paranoia will drive him from Bond’s apartment, put the necessary distance between them for Bond to do his work.

Part of him wants Q to lean toward Bond and breathe his name into Bond’s ear on a wash of damp, warm breath.

He almost shivers at the phantom sensation, and he releases Q so he can step back, away from any potential further contact.

Q doesn’t rub at his wrist or tuck his hand beneath his other arm or put it in his pocket. It’s as though the violence of Bond’s touch didn’t register at all.

It should have. Bond had no right to touch Q like that.

“You should go,” he says. There’s no venom in it; it’s a statement of fact, a warning even. Here be dragons: Run for your life.

Instead of listening, Q closes the few feet of space between them, puts a hand on Bond’s bare chest as if to steady himself— _unnecessary_ , Bond thinks, with the part of his brain still capable of analytical reasoning—and brushes the shell of Bond’s ear with his lips as he whispers his real name into it.

Bond shudders, not from the name—common enough, somehow not nearly so suitable as the single, eminent letter he carries with such authority and grace—but from the contact.

He is horrified to hear himself make a sound, the slightest, breathy exhale punched out of him by the intimacy of the moment. Where his control has gone, he doesn’t know.

Q says, “Take care, Bond,” then, and leaves, taking his ridiculous coat from the hook by the door on his way out.

Bond stares at that door for the longest time, as if he can see through it to Q, who is surely waiting just outside for Bond to call him back.

Shaking his head at his flight of fancy, Bond locks up and rearms the security system and returns to his bedroom to dress.

He is, after all, going to work today, but it has nothing to do with the quartermaster, of course.  
  


*****  
  
The next time they see one another, Bond is bleeding from a sluggish cut over his left eye. He’s got bruised ribs, a sprained ankle, and one or two loose teeth.

He’s intent upon delivering his Walther in person, however, because for once it’s in nearly pristine condition.

Q glances from the Walther to Bond’s face and back again, raising his own eyebrow as if to ask about the other guy.

“He’s dead,” Bond says, voice rough with smoke inhalation and cursing. He’d had to drag the last of the survivors out of the building by main force, and his shoulders are aching with tension and fatigue.

He wants whiskey, a bath, and his bed, perhaps not in that precise order.

“I’ll drive you home,” Q says, and Bond assumes it’s a non-sequitur until he realizes with shamed horror that he said that last thought out loud.

“I’m fine.”

“It’s your car or Medical, Bond.”

When did the quartermaster get so bossy? Bond wonders vaguely, letting Q steer him by the elbow out of his inner office. Some internal alarm system suggests that Bond might be worse off than he thought, given the relative docility with which he allows Q to take over.

The level of busy noise in the outer ring of desks halves as they emerge together from Q’s office, but a sharp tsk from Q has them flying on the keys double-time, and then they’re through the gauntlet and out into the hall near the security lift that will take them to the garage level.

Q types in the keyless entry to Bond’s car as if it’s the code to his own flat, and Bond would be impressed by the graceful competence, except he’s preoccupied with lowering himself into the passenger seat without groaning.

When Q takes his hand, Bond’s first instinct is to pull away. He’s bloody, his knuckles scraped—biohazards aside, he’s hardly in any shape for romance.

Only when Q presses his index finger to the biometric starter does Bond remember he has keyless _everything_.

He shouldn’t be surprised when, an eon later, Q lets himself into Bond’s flat without missing a beat. 

He’s too tired to raise even an eyebrow in mock surprise, and Q, for his part, is all efficient business, helping Bond out of his filthy clothes and half-pushing, half-cajoling him toward the walk-in double shower in his en suite.

“I’ll call for takeaway. What are you in the mood for?”

It’s a measure of Bond’s exhaustion that the obvious answer (a devilish, come-hither look) comes only belatedly, after Q has disappeared through the bedroom door to order Thai pumpkin curry from a place four blocks away.

He shucks off his boxers and socks and slips into the shower, hissing in pain as the powerful stream strikes his sore places like an assault. Once his muscles relax, it’s all he can do to stay on his feet, and he’s swaying indecisively, towel forgotten in his hand, when Q gives a perfunctory rap at the bathroom door and steps in, eyes going wide at the sight of Bond.

“Jesus,” he breathes, and on another occasion, Bond might have quipped about just calling him James, but his brain is too fuzzy for repartee, as evidenced by the fact that Q is across the room, steadying hand on his waist, the other looping Bond’s arm over his shoulder before Bond registers that he’s moved.

“You should be in medical,” Q says, as if Bond being upright in his own bathroom is an affront to all common human decency.

“I’ll settle for bed,” he says, but it comes out slurred. 

He doesn’t remember Q putting him to bed.

Sometime in the dim, quiet hours of the night, the period Bond most hates, he struggles up out of a dazed sleep to find Q keeping watch over him in a chair he’d hauled from the corner of the room. His bare feet are tucked up on the edge of the seat, his knees a barrier between them. Q’s eyes seem to swim, disembodied and glinting, behind a pair of round-framed glasses.

“What do you need?” Q asks softly.

Before Bond can say, “You,” he’s reclaimed by the creeping grey, towed under where the beloved dead wait to accuse him of his failures.

Q is still in the chair the next morning, though his bare feet are now snugged under the edge of the duvet near Bond’s hip. His head is back, revealing the long, white line of his throat. He looks achingly young in the pale morning light seeping through a crack in the blackout blinds.

Bond shifts, suppresses a volley of curses as his wounds make themselves known, and gets out of bed carefully, trying not to jostle Q awake.

The quartermaster murmurs indistinctly and sinks deeper into the chair, and though Bond suspects the position is doing the young man’s neck no good, he doesn’t wake him. The blue skin beneath his eyes testifies to his own exhaustion.

In the kitchen, he’s forced to admit that Q was right—he needs to put up a few more provisions if they’re going to start making a regular habit of this.

That stops him with his hand on the coffee tin.

Are they making this a habit? Surely twice does not a pattern make.

But it’s not just a stubborn refusal to let the bastards grind him down that has kept Bond alive all these years; he makes it a point not to lie to himself about the things that matter.

And Q does.

Just then, the subject of Bond’s thoughts appears from the bedroom, a sleepy-eyed, fey-limbed wet dream if Bond has ever had one.

Bond nearly fumbles the coffee tin, all his legendary dexterity reduced to numb-fingered clumsiness by the young man watching him from the kitchen doorway, a sleeve-crease on his high-boned cheek and a smile in his eyes, as if he knows what Bond is thinking.

Since what Bond is thinking just then would earn him a considerably different look, he suspects, he’ll have to cross telepathy off the list of his quartermaster’s many impressive talents.

“Figured it out?” Q asks, and Bond almost reconsiders his conclusion, re: mind-reading, until he realizes that Q is talking about coffeemaking and not what, exactly, Bond would like to do to Q given world enough and time.

“Mm,” Bond hums affirmatively. He leans back against the counter as a familiar burble fills the air, followed shortly thereafter by a heavenly scent.

“How did you sleep?” Bond asks, and Q shakes his head, “I think that’s my question, Bond. You’re the one who came home more bruised than not.”

It’s true he’s going to have to favor his right side for a few days, and it’s possible the ringing in his ears signals a more serious head wound than he’d self-diagnosed, but this isn’t the worst Bond has had by a long shot, and he says as much to Q.

This earns him a considering look, Q’s head tilted at an angle as he makes a long, slow survey of Bond’s infirmities.

“You’re getting older,” he observes cheekily, but in a matter-of-fact tone, like a docent at a museum reviewing a beloved but somewhat fusty English favorite. “It might be that you need to take better care.”

“Trying to get me behind a desk?” Bond asks, more lewd suggestion than innocent question.

A corner of Q’s mouth quirks up in acknowledgement of Bond’s innuendo. “No,” he answers, “You’ll die in the field like all of the loyal old workhorses,” and despite the Mona Lisa smile, his words are more teeth than lips.

“Don’t beat around the bush,” Bond barks, turning his back on Q to get cups out of the cupboard. “If you have something to say to me, say it.”

Q answers in action rather than words, though, appearing at Bond’s back seconds later as if sneaking up on a sanctioned killer is his idea of morning sport. Q takes one of the cups from Bond, long, cool fingers lingering on Bond’s hand, other hand snaking in front of Bond to steal the coffeepot before Bond can reach for it himself.

Smiling lips touching the white brim of the cup, Q looks up at him from beneath his ridiculous hair and even more ridiculous lashes.

“I thought I’d said it already: Your life matters. I’d like you to believe that.”

With an impatient huff, Bond reclaims the carafe and pours himself his own cup, scalding his tongue on the first sip but ignoring the pain, instead stalking toward the living room as if he’d leave Q and the conversation behind.

“I don’t have a death wish,” he throws out, sitting down—carefully—on the couch.

Q, relentless, follows him, sits beside him—also carefully—and props his bare feet on the edge of the coffee table, beside Bond’s.

Even the tops of his feet are bruised, and Bond loses a moment trying to remember how they got that way before Q brings him back to the present.

“Then act like it, Bond. You’re a walking bruise, you can barely sit without wincing, and you may have internal damage that won’t present until it’s too late. If you aren’t going to care about yourself, at least let me do it for you.”

“Why?” It’s out before he thinks about it, and he hates the way it sounds—like he’s inviting flattery, like he needs validation.

There is a stunned silence—at least, it feels that way to Bond, who’s trying to act as though he didn’t just admit something he’d rather have kept to himself.

Then, Q rests his hand lightly on Bond’s thigh. It’s a strange touch, not inviting further intimacy, just offering comfort of a kind with which Bond has precious little experience.

“Besides your infinitely fascinating penchant for chaos, destruction, violence, and resurrection?” Q asks lightly, defusing the sudden tension in the air between them.

“Do you really not know?” he continues, more softly, and Bond turns to look at Q, who is looking back at Bond with a warm, affectionate light in his eyes, his lips turned up at the corners, and this— _this_ — **is** an invitation.

Bond leans toward Q, gaze flickering from smile to eyes and back, but Q stops him with a finger on his lips. Bond resists the urge to touch his tongue to the finger, to get a hint of what Q tastes like. If Bond misread the cues—if Q is going to say no—Bond doesn’t want to have even that bit of carnal knowledge.

Q pauses, giving him that look from beneath his lashes. Bond’s heart lurches again, and he takes a short, sharp breath, feeling a little dizzy at the sudden rushing of blood to parts south.

“I may be a sure thing, but I didn’t come here to have sex with you. I came because I was concerned about you. Because I care about you. Do you understand?”

Bond does. Entirely. The cold is back again, a frisson of fear chasing its way down his spine. Q’s hand on his thigh seems heavier, like he’s holding Bond down, keeping him from moving away.

The fear passes, as it always does with Bond, in a cascade of pinpricks in his blood, adrenaline erasing any sense of self-preservation he might have had.

He recognizes that there’s something wrong with him, that his instincts are counter-productive if survival is their intention. If he had any real sense, he’d get up from the couch, go into his room, and close the door.

Instead, he stands—carefully, his ribs giving him hell—and holds out a hand in a gallant gesture. “Understood. Now, shall we?” 

But Q shakes his head. “You’re in no condition, James,” and as Bond opens his mouth to protest, Q plunges on, “If you won’t go to Medical to be checked, at least let me look you over?”

“You want to play doctor?” Bond asks, a laugh in his voice.

Q stands up without the aid of Bond’s proffered hand and says, “I want to make sure I’m not going to kill you.”

Bond snorts. “You think a lot of yourself, don’t you?”

Q, hips switching deliberately, moves away from the couch toward Bond’s bedroom. “You’ll never know if you don’t get in here and take your clothes off, 007.”

Q is waiting by the bed when Bond sidles in. The light from the bedside table casts a pool across the center of his bed.

Q nods to it. “On your back, please.” The clinical tone is somewhat countered by the knowing smirk curling one corner of his lips.

Bond undresses slowly, partly to make a show of it but mostly because he’s stiff. His ribs protest with every motion; shrugging his shirt off his shoulders is agony.

By the time he’s naked, he’s breathing harder than he should be, and it has nothing at all to do with his proximity to Q and a bed.

He climbs onto the bed as carefully as he can, but it’s a struggle not to let his discomfort show. By the time he’s reclined against the pillows, there’s a thin film of sweat on his brow, and Bond concedes that perhaps he’s not up for much of anything today after all.

Q’s first touch changes his mind.

He begins at Bond’s throat, where three livid half-moons act as testament to the mark who’d tried to strangle him. It doesn’t hurt much, and Bond tilts his head up, exposing more of his throat, hoping Q might follow fingers with lips.

He’d like to feel Q’s breath against the skin of his throat. Just the thought of it makes his breath catch, and he closes his eyes and swallows as Q’s caress leaves his throat and moves down his chest.

It’s all Bond can do to keep from grabbing Q’s hand and guiding it to his nipples, which Q deftly avoids.

He’d groan in frustration, but he suspects that would only encourage Q, who seems intent upon his examination.

The quartermaster’s fingers move to Bond’s ribcage, touch firm but gentle. A glance at his face shows that his eyes are fixed on Bond’s torso, which is mottled with angry red and purple contusions, and there’s a furrow between his eyes that bodes no good for Bond’s immediate future.

Indeed, for as careful as he’s being, when Q’s fingers move across the first damaged rib, it’s all Bond can do not to break his wrist.

As it is, he hisses and tries to shrink from the probing fingers, but Q’s hand on his opposite hip stills him, focusing his attention on the heat radiating from his palm and the firmness with which he holds Bond in place.

A corresponding heat flares in his belly, and Bond sucks in a breath, which transforms into a curse as Q’s fingers touch another sore spot.

“I think you’ve got two cracked ribs,” Q notes, “possibly three.”

Still trying to catch is breath from the sudden spike in pain, Bond nods in acknowledgement. He manages a weedy, “Nothing can be done for them,” and gets a nod in return.

Q’s hands have moved to Bond’s abdomen, also bruised. He palpates one and then another, the pain deep but not sharp— _bearable_ , Bond thinks.

As the quartermaster’s quick, confident hands move lower, Bond’s breathing shifts, deepens, pleasure moving through him in a languid, hot wave. He feels heavy, as if he could sink through the mattress, and despite that he can feel himself growing hard, there’s no urgency in the sensation, only a sense of warmth and a promise of later fire.

Then, Q’s hand on his thigh stops. A period of seconds pass, until Bond is disturbed enough from his weighted, gentle bliss to pry open one eye.

Q’s eyes track from something he sees on Bond’s inner thigh to Bond’s eyes, and then Q traces the offending mark with a careful finger.

Bond remembers how he got the handprint there and waits until Q is looking at him. He holds the look for a span of seconds and then shakes his head once, firmly.

Q’s lips thin, but he dips his chin, apparently accepting Bond’s answer.

The truth is that the same man who’d cracked his ribs had put the mark there while wrestling with Bond, trying to pry Bond’s legs from around his neck.

Q doesn’t need to know the whole story, and anyway, coherence is rapidly receding beyond Bond’s grasp as Q’s fingers wander to a yet more intimate part of Bond’s anatomy.

Q touches Bond’s half-hard cock, holds it for a long moment as if weighing it, and then gives an experimental stroke, which punches the air out of Bond’s lungs with a breathy moan.

He lets his head fall back against the pillow and closes his eyes, giving himself over to the quartermaster’s intent ministrations.

It should be almost clinical: Q’s hand on Bond’s cock is the only point of contact between them, and Q is still fully clothed, whereas Bond is stretched out naked under his hands.

But Q’s monologue is anything but clinical, a steady stream of observations and commands in that butter-wouldn’t-melt voice he sometimes uses on the comms line when things have gone to utter shite.

“God, look at you,” he’s saying now, his hand tightening its grip but also slowing, the pace almost languorous. “Your cock is perfect, did you know that? Just the right width for gripping.”

Bond isn’t in a position to comment, given that said grip is undoing him stroke by slow, tight, deliberate stroke.

His hips leave the bed in frantic, helpless little thrusts, and Q splays his free hand over Bond’s lower belly, right over the place where pleasure is pooling heavy and hot. 

“Fuck,” Q adds, something ragged in his voice, and Bond opens his eyes just so he can see his quartermaster’s expression.

There’s color high on Q’s cheeks, and he’s bitten his lips to a ruby red. He’s watching his hand as it moves.

As if Bond’s gaze has weight, Q draws his eyes up Bond’s body, and the moment his eyes meet Bond’s, Bond feels his orgasm pulse through him, dizzying and unexpected. He cries out—Q’s real name—and bites it off, and Q’s free hand leaves his belly to press into one of the bruises higher up.

Bond grunts, hips thrusting wildly, and comes harder, until his vision is shot through with streamers and he’s choking on his own breath.

“So beautiful,” Q murmurs, leaning over to swipe his fingers through the spend on Bond’s belly, making Bond curse.

With his other hand, Q frees his own cock and, kneeling now beside Bond on the bed, strips himself fast and hard, his eyes fastened on Bond’s face until his eyes stutter closed and a hot arc of spend splashes across Bond’s chest.

There is the heady scent of sex hanging in the air around them, and the only sound is their breathing as they come down from their respective orgasms.

Q has sat back on his heels and is pulling a handkerchief from his pocket when Bond reaches out to run his finger down the thin skin of Q’s wrist, tracing the blue there, feeling his heart in the touch.

Q goes still and fixes his eyes on Bond, who is watching the progress of his finger as if it will lead him to some secret of the universe.

When Bond looks up from beneath his lashes—two can play at that game, thank you very much—Q is wearing a quiet little smile, and his eyes are fond.

“Did I pass my physical, doctor?” Bond asks, still caressing Q’s inner arm, running his finger slowly up the pale, smooth skin near his elbow.

Q swallows and nods, says, “Yes,” in a low rasp and then has to clear his throat to say, “Should I go?”

Bond doesn’t hesitate in his movement, following now the strong line of Q’s bicep, admiring his lithe strength. He doesn’t let his hesitation show on his face, either.

Despite what Q had said earlier, despite knowing what this choice was intended to mean, Bond feels a frisson of unease worm through his chest and curl in his gut like a snake.

But he says, “Please don’t,” and at last moves his hand away to indicate the other side of the bed.

It’s ten o’clock on a workday morning, but neither of them mentions expediencies. Q undresses with admirable efficiency, leaving his clothes in a neat pile on the chair in the corner of the room, and slides beneath the bedcovers.

He hesitates, obviously unsure of where to put his body, and Bond reaches between them under the covers and wraps his fingers around Q’s wrist, feeling the pulse there sure and steady.

It leaves his gun hand free, which is his intention, but gives them a point of contact.

Q makes a noise that’s almost lost in the shifting of the mattress as they both settle down to sleep, but Bond hears it, and it arrows to his heart and blossoms there in a sudden upwelling of affection and possession and fear.

Those are the feelings that follow him into his dreams.

  
*****

Cairo is, as his American counterpart so aptly puts it, a “shitshow.”

Bond liaises with Agent Brown six hours before the hand-off is scheduled to go down. He’s posing as an arms dealer and the Company man is supposed to be his banker-cum-muscle.

Everything is going smoothly until a third-party target laser appears on Qasim Saada’s forehead and the whine of an incoming rocket signals the termination of negotiations.

Pursued by what’s left of Saada’s AQAP cell and an army of mercs apparently working for the uninvited guests, Bond and Brown make it to the outskirts of the city, where their borrowed Land Rover gives up the ghost in a cloud of radiator steam and wheezing.

Taking insufficient cover in a nearby warehouse, Brown’s terse situational assessment—“We’re fucked”—is confirmed by the telltale buzzing of a thousand angry bees.

“Drone,” Bond growls as they throw themselves out the door from which they just came, clearing the blast zone with only a meter to spare before the building implodes with a breath-sucking whoosh.

All this time, Q has been in Bond’s ear, offering exfil options and a running commentary on the location of their pursuers.

His voice is a center of calm in a world that’s turned to blood and fire, and Bond is glad for it even as he’s struck by a shard of sheet metal as a secondary explosion erupts from the fiery remains of the warehouse.

The shrapnel catches him high in the back of his thigh and throws him onto the ground, where he is forced to cover his head and hope for the best as a rain of searing metal pelts down around him.

Then there’s a hand on his ass and a gruff voice saying, “This is going to hurt like hell,” before a searing pain knifes through him. He clenches his teeth around the urge to scream, and then Brown is pressing something to the wound, pressure setting off a series of agonizing after-shocks, and Bond is panting, “We need exfil now,” to Q.

Brown says, “No shit,” and pulls Bond to his feet to help him into the lee of the rusted hulk of a crane housing, where he proceeds to take off his own jacket, shirt, and undershirt so that he can use said undershirt for an impromptu field dressing.

Bond can’t see the wound without a lot of awkward twisting about, and he’s more focused on, well, covering his own ass and Brown’s as well, so when Brown says, “The bleeding’s slowed,” Bond has to take him at his word.

Meanwhile, Q is saying, “007?” in the slightly less ruffled tone that means he’s been saying to for a while.

“Here,” Bond says. “I’m hit, but it’s not serious,” as Brown shrugs back into his shirt and jacket.

“We’ve got to move,” Brown says, pulling Bond to his feet.

“Q?” Bond asks through a hiss—it might not be serious, but his wound hurts like the devil.

“East, thirty meters, there’s a shipping bin,” and Bond turns, finds their next cover, and indicates it to Brown.

“You good to go?” Brown asks over shriek of collapsing metal from the warehouse behind them.

“Move,” Bond answers, and they do, Brown expertly quartering the field of vision behind them while Bond hobbles toward the container.

Bullets ping and whine off the box as Brown throws himself behind it next to Bond.

“Another thirty-five meters, east southeast,” Q says, and Bond sees it before the quartermaster says, “Burned-out car.”

The Mercedes has certainly seen better days, but it’s still more recognizable than the charred lump of flesh fused to the rotting front seat.

Bond ignores the faint, lingering odor of human barbecue as he lays down cover fire for Brown.

“Your ride is three minutes out,” Q says, and Bond surveys the high spots with a practiced eye.

“Sniper,” Bond notes, nodding in the direction of a crumbling brick tenement across a weedy lot from the burning warehouse.

“And there’s our friends,” Brown notes, directing Bond’s gaze to a Toyota Hi-Lux emerging from the smoke and heading right for them.

“We don’t have three minutes,” Bond notes, and Q huffs, “Two and a quarter,” which makes Bond smile, though there’s little of humor in it.

“It’s been a pleasure, quartermaster,” Bond says, watching the approaching vehicle with expert eyes.

“It’s not over yet,” Q answers, and it might be interference from the distant groan of tortured metal or the arhythmic noise of an overtaxed truck engine, but Bond thinks Q sounds a little desperate.

Suddenly, mingling like a slow-acting poison with the usual blood-spikes of adrenaline and pain, Bond feels regret.

Like a seeping wound, it bleeds through him, enough to make him catch and hold his breath, tighten his jaw against it, as if resisting the feeling will make it any less real.

At the best of times, Bond hates being reminded of his mortality. He’s built a legendary career on defying the odds; resurrection of a sort is his specialty. All the other times he’s been in danger, every mission that went pear-shaped, Bond’s self-preservation had been tied to the reckless spending of his life’s blood.

Now, suddenly, he’s afraid he might never see Q again, never feel his hand on his belly or hear the soft rumble of his voice through the skin of his throat.

This…this _feeling_.

It’s intolerable. 

Like biting a bullet, Bond growls around the regret, clears his throat, looks at Brown, who’s conserving his ammunition and watching the Hi-Lux bounce toward them.

“One minute,” Q says in Bond’s ear, and this time he can hear the fear there. It’s intimate like a wound and Bond swallows hard, shakes his head as if he could get Q out of it, and nudges Brown.

“Exfil in forty-five seconds.”

Brown grunts noncommittally just as Bond hears the first vocal protests of an overtaxed engine and turns to see a dust cloud making its way toward their position.

He squints through the obscurity, mutters, “Volvo?” to Q, who confirms it with undisguised relief.

Bond hates Q a little at that moment because he sounds young and alive and worth surviving for, and Bond can’t think that way, can’t afford to want to live if it means questioning every decision in the field.

Under withering fire from the merc army’s M-4s, Bond and Brown throw themselves into the back of the decrepit station wagon, and they’re retreating in a rooster tail of dust as the rear windshield is reduced to splinters by gunfire.

Their driver doesn’t introduce himself, and they don’t ask. For Bond’s part, sitting is painful, and the sprung backseat of the old wreck is doing him no good.

He watches through the filthy windscreen as the driver navigates a series of increasingly narrow dirt alleys until he pulls to a stop in front of a nondescript, dirty-white building that could be twenty or two thousand years old.

“Out,” he says in accented English—Armenian, if Bond had to guess—and they do as they’re told, Q saying, “You should be safe here for the night; the original exfil plan is still green-lit. Do you need medical attention, 007?”

“Fine,” Bond answers to the first two parts. “No,” curtly to the third.

Brown handles check-in, which is only as official as a crumpled wad of the local currency can make it, and his insistence on a single room earns them a speculative leer from the toothless hag on the counter.

Bond doesn’t give a fig for his reputation—he’s been accused of much worse by better—and the steady ache in his thigh is reminding him he’s still got bullet extraction to look forward to.

As he follows Brown through a battered wooden door that might once have been the color of an Egyptian sunset, he advises Q, “I’m going dark,” not waiting for a response before taking the earwig out and dropping it in the “pill” case he uses when he doesn’t want Queen and country looking over his shoulder, so to speak.

He thinks he hears a squawk of protest just before he snaps the lid shut.

Brown quirks an eyebrow at the motion. “You sure about that?”

Bond gives him a look that the American agent seems to correctly interpret, and he puts both hands up in an _It’s your funeral gesture_ before removing his jacket and indicating the ratty bed cover.

“Lice or septicemia?” he asks, and Bond tightens his lips and blows out a short, sharp breath.

Then he removes his shoes, trousers, and jacket, using the last item for a pillow as he stretches out across the bed, parallel to the headboard.

“I see how it is,” Brown huffs, rolling his sleeves up before disappearing into the bathroom, where moments later the bang of plumbing indicates his attempt at something like sterile conditions.

He emerges a few minutes later with a fistful of thin, grey towels and a pocketknife that’s been passed under running water.

This he sterilizes more thoroughly with a lighter he retrieves from his jacket pocket.

Bond feels the heat of the approaching blade before he feels it widening the bullet wound, and he pushes his face into his jacket and concentrates on breathing through the worst of the pain.

Twenty minutes later, the bullet deposited in a little pool of Bond’s blood on the nightstand, and Brown is saying, “You’d better use the pillow.”

Since he’s had wounds cauterized with gunpowder before, Bond can’t disagree, loathe as he is to put his mouth anywhere near the yellowing case covering the musty pillow.

Sometime after that, Bond’s panting through the aftershocks, lightning bolts cluttering his vision, sweat trickling down his neck.

Brown rests his hand on the small of Bond’s back for a moment, broad, callused fingers splayed out in the sweat there, and says, “Okay?”

Bond nods into the pillow, gasps, “Fine,” and then closes his eyes until his stomach settles.

Brown goes out long enough to fetch hydrogen peroxide, a topical antibiotic, a handful of suspicious off-white pills, and bottled water the temperature of spit.

Bond hisses through the peroxide treatment and then lets himself relax as Brown soothes the cream into his wound.

“It looks good. No sign of infection yet,” Brown notes, handing Bond a water and a couple of the suspect pills.

Ignoring the pills, Bond drinks half a liter of water and then settles on his good side, head on his arm, and takes a longer look at Brown, who lets him.

A slow blink later, Bond wakes to a room bathed in sepia shadows. Brown is reading a newspaper in Arabic at the table in the corner, a half-eaten kabob on greasy paper at his elbow.

“Hungry?” Brown asks without looking up.

A brief self-analysis tells Bond that the pain-induced nausea has passed, and he is, indeed, ravenously hungry.

“I could eat,” he concedes, levering himself upright with care. The first pressure on his wound sets him on fire from hip to ankle, but he breathes through it, and it subsides into a steady, hot ache.

There’s a second kabob cooked to a red-brown splendor, the meat—lamb—dripping spicy grease onto the paper, and a container of fuul with egg, which Bond uses a pita to shovel into his mouth.

Brown snorts in amusement, and Bond gives him a look.

The American shrugs. “Thought you Brits were too stuck-up to eat with your hands.”

Bond’s look changes, meaning unmistakable. He licks savory juice off his fingers, making a show of it, and smirks at Brown.

Brown snorts again, though there’s less force behind it.

“You’ve got a hole in your ass,” he reminds Bond, and Bond’s eyebrow does all the work of mining the potential out of that particularly rich line.

“You’ll be gentle,” Bond says.

Brown isn’t.

The sex is athletic, almost violent, and it takes Bond out of his head, until he’s nothing but the ache between his legs and Brown’s big hands leaving bruises on his ass, his mouth a searing agony at the wound and then a searing glory somewhere else.

They finish with each other’s mouths, Bond drooling and gasping as Brown uses him and swallows him down, both, and when they’re done, the bed is a worse wreck, his leg wound is seeping a thin trickle of blood, and he is floating just above the pain, skimming its fire but not really feeling it.

“That was fucked up,” Brown pants, big hand resting on Bond’s lower abdomen.

“Mmm,” Bond agrees, letting his eyes fall shut.

He’s not sure how long he’s been out when he swims up out of the grey to voices outside the door, low and urgent, and manages to roll onto the far side of the bed, carpet sticky beneath his bare feet, wishing he still had his gun or even his pants, for that matter.

Then the door is opening and 003 is coming through it.

She’s petite and lethal, dressed in cool pale silk tank and loose linen slacks, hijab hiding her long fall of dark brown hair, and though she’s too much of a professional to wrinkle her nose at the stench of sex and blood in the room, the glance that scans the room stutters on the bed and then drags itself up to meet Bond’s eyes with a blank, carefully neutral stare.

Something in the look reminds him of Q, and he swallows a sudden upsurge of sick, cold dread. 

“Get dressed. We’re going,” she says curtly, and Bond bites back the urge to say something provocative. It’s not her fault he suddenly feels guilty.

Brown is just outside the door, wearing only boxer briefs and a smirk when Bond shuffles through it a few minutes later.

Being retrieved by a fellow 00 saves Bond any small talk, but he has a feeling he’s in for plenty of awkwardness as he’s ushered with a gesture into the back of a dusty, nondescript Honda Accord.

Bond doesn’t look back as they pull away.

003 is in the passenger seat, and Bond knows it’s foolish to read disapproval from the back of her head alone, but he feels the urge to explain himself, an urge he’d experienced only a handful of times before, all of them in the presence of a woman much older and infinitely more dangerous than 003, license to kill notwithstanding.

Bond’s not so self-deluded that he doesn’t recognize projection when he feels it; it’s not 003 judging him. He’s damned sure aware of what he’s done.

Irritation soon enough replaces self-reproach, however, as the pain in his thigh obliterates any clinging vestiges of remembered pleasure.

His muscles are tense, and he’s got an incipient headache over his right eye when they pull up to a private airstrip not far from Cairo International.

There’s a Gulfstream G3 waiting for them on the tarmac, stairs gleaming in the last of the day’s sun. This hadn’t been the exfil plan.

“I take it there’s some urgency in my return?” he asks, not expecting and not receiving an answer. 

003 merely indicates that he should precede her up the steps, which he does, taking his preferred seat over the wing, 003 flanking him on the other side of the aisle.

It’s a long six hours before they’re wheels-down in London. Other than answering the cabin attendant’s queries about beverages and blankets, Bond doesn’t speak. 003 disappears inside earbuds and a tablet as soon as they’re off the ground in Cairo, and Bond doesn’t feel like attempting to penetrate her obvious front.

He has a feeling he’d have better luck getting through bulletproof glass.

The Audi waiting on the tarmac in London takes them to the home office, depositing them at the security desk on the second sublevel.

They ride the elevator in silence, 003 clearly ordered to escort him door to door, which she does, peeling off only after Moneypenny says, “Ah, I see you’ve brought home our prodigal son. Thank you, 003.”

Then it’s Moneypenny ostentatiously ignoring him for several long minutes until the intercom chimes and Moneypenny says, “You can go in,” curtly.

Her tone alone warns him that he’s in some kind of trouble, a fact that becomes far more obvious when he sees M’s smooth, politician’s face.

It looks like gleaming plastic in the unkind backlighting provided by London’s nightscape.

“Commander Bond,” M says, inflectionless. “You know the Home Secretary, I assume.”

Said personage is sitting in the shadows to one side of M’s desk. There are no other chairs.

It’s been a long time since he’s been called onto the carpet, literally, and he likes it no more now than he did then, when he thought he’d earned it.

Now, he has no idea what he’s supposed to have done.

“I’ve had a most curious call from my counterpart across the pond.”

 _Ah_.

“She was concerned about your methods in apprehending Qasim Saada. He was a person of particular interest for their organization, and as I instructed when I briefed you on the mission, you were merely there to provide Agent Brown with the connections and cover required for said apprehension.”

As there was no question in M’s monologue, Bond remains silent, hands crossed in front of him, eyes on the middle distance over M’s head.

“Have you any explanation that might allay my counterpart’s concern?”

Bond shrugs and at last looks at M, his smirk somewhat less potent for how tired he is. He can feel a fine tremble in his knees, and his wound throbs abominably.

He’s not sure how much longer he can keep his feet.

“I wasn’t responsible for leaking the details of our meeting to a third party,” Bond says, as precisely as he can given the way grey is starting to encroach on the edges of his vision. 

“Even so, a leak occurred,” M observes. There is a dangerous calm to M’s tone that sharpens Bond’s focus.

He pulls together the last of his strength with what’s left of his will.

“Have you suggested that your counterpart, how is it the Americans say it? ‘Check home.’”

Behind him to his right, the Home Secretary makes a scoffing noise, as if he’s about to intervene.

M offers him a conciliatory glance, but there is nothing remotely solicitous about his expression when his eyes come back to Bond.

“You will fix this, Commander Bond, or you will find your future missions are…limited in scope.”

In other words, he’ll get all the shite babysitting jobs until he retires or eats a bullet or some combination thereof.

He nods, short and sharp, to indicate he understands M’s threat.

“Debrief is at 0800. Get to Medical.”

It’s a dismissal of the sort delivered by headmasters the world over: equal parts disdain and disappointment.

Bond turns without acknowledging the Home Secretary, too intent on not losing consciousness to worry about saving face.

Moneypenny is on the side of the door and wastes no time in sliding her shoulder beneath his armpit and taking some of his swaying weight.

“Let’s get you to bed, shall we?” she asks, something warm and exasperated in her tone.

Bond slurs, “Thought you’d never ask,” before Tanner falls in on his other side, and Bond lets himself slip under for a while, reasonably confident in their combined ability to see that the doctors don’t amputate anything he’ll need later.  
  


*****

He rouses an eon later in the grey, clean-smelling, cool-sheeted space he recognizes as Medical. Before opening his eyes, he does a cursory inventory, pleased to find that the pain in his thigh is only a dull, cotton-swaddled throb rather than the searing agony of earlier.

His head is a little fuzzy, too, and his mouth is dry as a tomb and tastes like one too—full of decay and rot.

There’s no one at his side when he finally opens his eyes. Bond resists the urge to be disappointed. He’s awoken on plenty of occasions without anyone to say, “Welcome back,” and there’s no need for him to feel like he’s missing something this time.

Except he does, he realizes with mounting alarm. He’d rather expected Q.

And then he remembers why it is that Q may not have wasted his time waiting at Bond’s bedside.

Right.

He swallows the swimming nausea that follows this realization, chalking it up to the pain medication, which usually makes him queasy, and searches out a drink of water.

A brief survey of the rolling table at his bedside reveals the ubiquitous plastic pitcher and cup, and he’s pleased to find he has enough hand-eye coordination to pour without spilling much.

The tepid water tastes like a miracle, and he closes his eyes against the sensation of it sliding down his throat and spreading through his belly.

When he opens them, Q is there, taking the cup from his suddenly unsteady hand and setting it on the table, which he rolls closer for ease of reach.

“Q,” Bond says, reading the quartermaster’s face and finding nothing but bad news in it.

Q nods, refers to the tablet in his hand, and says, “I trust you’re well?” in the cool, professional voice Bond’s heard him use when M has given him an order he finds particularly distasteful to follow.

“Well enough,” Bond agrees, pushing himself in the bed, uncomfortable with having to look quite so far up at Q.

Q takes a polite step away from the bed, so Bond doesn’t have to strain, and refers to his tablet again.

“I’m here after an accounting of the items you had on loan from my department.”

It’s scut-work, well beneath Q’s pay-grade, to say nothing of his title and skillset. Though it had been a beloved tradition for Bond to report directly to the head of Q-branch with his deconstructed equipment and for Q to respond with spectacular scorn to Bond’s excuses for the state of said equipment, that had had nothing to do with duty—for either of them.

This errand Q’s on also has nothing to do with duty, unless it is a duty to himself, Bond thinks.

His manner, his tone, the way his eyes won’t quite meet Bond’s—that’s telling Bond all he needs to know about the state of their relationships, both professional and personal.

He wonders who told Q about Agent Brown, and then he recognizes that it hardly matters. Bond would have told Q himself, or he’d have found out about it some other way.

The knowledge—Q knowing—isn’t the problem here.

The problem is, of course, that Bond fucked Agent Brown willingly, even enthusiastically, and in a capacity that had nothing to do with fulfilling the mission specifications.

He doesn’t need the icy slurry sloshing about in his gut to tell him he’s screwed up.

Unease is followed quickly by a flash of hot irritation, melting away the cold, replacing it with heat that travels up his throat and across his cheeks.

He tilts his chin up in a defensive gesture he hasn’t employed since he was a schoolboy called into the headmaster’s office for some transgression. Recognizing that only strengthens his irritation.

“You’re welcome to search me for your equipment, Quartermaster.” He holds his arms out wide and dons a shark’s grin, all teeth and ill intent.

Q’s lips thin, but the zing of victory at having gotten to him is almost immediately deadened by a look at his eyes, which are dark with anger and, worse, hurt.

“I—” Bond begins in a softer tone, but Q shakes his head, a short, inelegant motion, and under cover of moving his hair off his forehead jerks his chin toward the far corner of the room opposite the door.

Bond moves his eyes and nothing else, taking in the innocuous ceiling panel there, and understands: Surveillance.

“I’m afraid I didn’t manage to hang on to any of your equipment,” he says in a voice that is still mockingly contrite but not intended, this time, to do any real harm. It’s the suave, flirtatious voice Bond always uses with Q in public spaces, and it shouldn’t raise red flags for any inquiring listeners.

“Rather busy being shot, I suppose,” is Q’s characteristically wry response. Bond isn’t fooled. He can see the tightness around Q’s mouth and the tension lines around his eyes, and he knows he’s responsible for them.

He feels like shite, and he doesn’t know how to fix any of it—neither his feelings of guilt and attendant irritation nor Q’s disguised but real pain.

Q removes the immediate impetus by turning toward the door, tossing a too-casual, “Get well,” over his shoulder.

“Q,” Bond calls, struggling through looming exhaustion and the haze of pain meds to find words that will convey his apologies without betraying them both.

But Q doesn’t turn around. He says, so softly that Bond wonders later if he heard it at all, “James,” admonishing and fond and sad.

And then he’s gone.

Bond’s heart is lead in his chest, beating so sluggishly that he wonders it doesn’t set off the monitor alarm.

He wants to call out to Q to come back, surveillance be damned, and tell him how sorry he is, that he was afraid of how he’d felt, how Q made him feel, that he can change, he’ll be better, he’ll earn back Q’s trust.

Too late. Q is gone, and with him any hope Bond had of repairing the damage he’d wrought.

Tired and sick of his treacherous heart, Bond lets the grey fog take him under again, where regret follows him, hounding his dreams and waking him later, haunted and shaking and alone.

*****

When Bond’s finished healing and requalifying for field work, the Saada situation is still waiting for him, and he goes to collect his gun and comms equipment with a cold, heavy dread in his belly.

Q greets him with a professional veneer, walks him through the latest modifications to his Walther and earwig, gives him the usual caveats about what should and should not be done with them, and hands him the tablet to sign his acknowledgement of receipt.

At no point do the eyes that meet his have any sign of warmth or recognition in them. It is as if Q and Bond are work acquaintances, nothing more; Bond could be any functionary filling out his paperwork for all the feeling that Q projects.

It doesn’t sting any less for knowing he deserves it.

At the door on his way out, Bond pauses.

“Something else, Commander Bond?” Q’s smooth, bland voice asks. It is a warning in and of itself, and Bond abandons what he was going to say. 

Later, after the measured, disinterested voice of a stranger has gotten Bond as far as he can go, as he slumps, panting, in the fire-blackened corner of a bombed-out house in Pakistan, Bond wishes he’d said it anyway, no matter how unfair it would have been to impose his own, inadequate penitence upon Q’s clear unwillingness to hear it.

He laughs a little, a dry, bitter sound that pumps blood from beneath his clutching fingers.

The Q-branch specialist says, “Exfil is inbound, approximate ETA five minutes,” and Bond grunts, “Copy that,” and lets the line go dead.

He doesn’t want to be talked through his last moments by a stranger. He wants Q, unequivocally and with a lancing, painful clarity.

His heart clenches and stutters, and only some of it can be attributed to blood loss and shock.

For as often as Bond has stood on the brink and stared into death’s stygian abyss, he’s never felt this before, this desperate, clutching agony of want.

“Get me Q,” Bond orders, putting the last of his energy into the bark.

The voice at the other end demurs and then falters and, seconds later, is replaced.

“007?”

Bond’s eyes flutter closed at the familiar voice.

“Q,” Bond answers, swallowing around a painful welling of sorrow in his throat. “I’m sorry to call you away from your work,” and he means it, not even a suggestion of sarcasm in his voice.

“I wouldn’t be anywhere else, Commander Bond.”

Even with the wall of formality Q is careful to keep between them, Bond flatters himself that he can hear something of the old warmth in the quartermaster’s voice. It might be shock-induced delusion, his equivalent of the purported final light, but Bond doesn’t care to examine it too closely.

“Exfil in four minutes, Commander,” Q informs him, and Bond thinks he detects urgency there.

Bond coughs, hawks out a wad of phlegm and blood, and murmurs, “I’m sorry,” with what breath he can marshal.

“Nonsense, Commander, it’s my job.” There is something of warning in the way Q emphasizes Bond’s title. They aren’t alone on the line now, and in any case, field communications are always recorded.

Bond finds that he doesn’t care, not for himself, at any rate. But the quartermaster has a long career in the service ahead of him, and it would hardly be proof of his repentance if Bond destroyed that career as his own came to a terminal point.

“I—” he begins to say, and then he must drag his bloody hand away from his streaming side because he needs both hands on his gun to discourage his pursuers.

Shaky as his aim is, his gunfire seems to buy him a little more time, which is all he has left one way or the other.

“Exfil in two minutes, Bond,” Q says.

Bond hears the fear in Q’s voice and swallows his own down, driving it into the dim, narrow closet where it's lived since he was a small boy, a place that smells of gun oil and damp wool and dogs.

He thinks he must have said some of that out loud.

“It’s alright, James,” Q is saying. “You’re not alone. I’ll stay with you until help arrives.”

It skirts the edge of protocol, tempting the professional/personal line.

Bond wants to tell Q not to jeopardize himself like that, but he can’t seem to find breath enough to form words.

He tries whispering, “I’m s...sorry,” again, and this time Q’s voice is warm and thick with some unspoken feeling when he says, “I forgive you, James.”

Bond can hear a heartbeat growing louder in his ears, a steady, deep throbbing that fills his head and vibrates in his chest, filling his lungs and his throat, making it impossible to breathe.

He tries to clear his throat, tries to draw in a last breath to say goodbye, a final sign-off to reassure Q that his words have been received, but Bond can’t get any air, and he hears, as if through deep water, a single voice calling his name, calling him home.

He goes.

*****

There is no pain. That’s the first thing Bond notices.

The second is a warm hand wrapped carefully around his own, the vague tug of something under his skin indicating that he’s got an IV port there.

The latter is a familiar enough sensation. The former is rare enough as to be seriously alarming, and it pulls Bond the rest of the way out of the dense gray clouds he’d been floating in for the past several minutes.

“There you are,” a somewhat rough but beloved and familiar voice says, and Bond slants his eyes—because turning his head seems like a bad idea—to see Q sitting in a blue-vinyl-covered chair. He’s wearing a cable-knit cardigan the same color as his eyes, reading glasses, and a small, careful smile, holding a tablet in one hand and, in the other, Bond’s own.

Q squeezes—gently—and uncurls from the chair, setting the tablet on the bedside table and saying, “I’ll get the doctor,” before leaning over to brush the ghostliest of kisses across Bond’s forehead.

Bond blames the drugs and the post-blood-loss weakness for the immediacy with which his eyes fill at the kindness of the gesture.

The doctor who comes bustling in is tall and olive-skinned, with salt-and-pepper hair and a wide mouth, which is smiling distantly at him.

“Ah, the dead awake,” he says in the lilting accent of southern Pakistan, and proceeds to introduce himself and examine Bond’s sutures, read his chart, and offer some platitudes about quick healing.

When the air in the room has stilled after the doctor’s departure, Q resumes his seat by Bond’s side.

“How long?” Bond asks.

Q swallows visibly. “Six days. It was touch and go during surgery—you coded once in the helicopter and again on the table. And then infection set in. As Dr. Wali said, you’re lucky to be alive.”

Bond thinks he’s lucky for another reason, but he doesn’t have the strength to put thought to action.

Instead, he says, “Brown?”

“Dead,” Q answers in a flat, cool voice.

Bond nods carefully, testing the movement. “Good.”

Agent Brown had turned out to be duplicitous, having sold information on the Saada mission to a rival arms dealer in Syria, who’d sent a small army to take care of the competition in Cairo. 

Brown’s seduction of Bond—to Bond’s eternal shame an almost entirely effortless ploy—had been calculated to distract him from thinking too deeply about the ways in which their meet had gone pear-shaped.

M had assigned Bond to liaise with Brown again on the suspicion that Brown was, indeed, a double agent.

Ultimately, he’d been merely greedy, not traitorous, though motives had hardly mattered when Brown had shot Bond in the back while they’d fled yet another ambush.

Bond’s pleased to learn his return fire had been accurate.

“I’m sorry,” he says, reaching for Q’s hand, though the gesture is somewhat hampered by the IV line and the bedrail.

Q takes his hand in both of his own, cradling it like it’s fragile, tracing the heavy blue veins on the top of his hand, bumping over his scarred knuckles, trailing around his cuticles, making him take in a quick breath.

That’s a mistake, triggering a coughing fit that leaves him red-faced and gasping, a vice-grip squeezing his ribcage. He wheezes and then heaves up bile.

Q gentles him through the coughing, holds a basin while he retches, fetches a warm, wet cloth to wipe his face clean of tears and snot and sick.

Wrung out and still struggling to clear his airway, Bond can only hold Q’s hand and mouth the words, “Thank you.”

Q kisses his brow again and begins to tell Bond a story about something Bond hopes is not very important, because he can feel the grey cloud wrapping around him, rocking him down into a cool, dark place where he does not have to think or feel or be.

He thinks he hears, “Sleep, love,” but it might be his imagination supplying the beloved voice, the fond words, the affectionate tone.   
  


*****

  
Over the next two days, Bond drifts in and out of sleep. Dr. Wali appears sporadically to offer him encouraging words or, increasingly, to ease his fractiousness. He has never been a patient patient.

Nurses poke and prod him day and night and bring him meds and check his catheter and IV line.

It all has the quality of a not particularly interesting dream.

The only constant, the fixed point upon which Bond can rely when he opens his eyes, is Q at his bedside. He’s reading or napping or tapping busily at a laptop or on the phone walking someone patiently through this or that.

When his talk is not directed at Bond, Bond lets himself float on the easy rise and fall of Q’s beautiful voice, or he fixes his eyes on the long-fingered, elegantly expressive hands and tries to imagine them conducting a symphony along the skin of his throat and his belly and his thighs.

He has no right to those thoughts, Bond knows, but he hasn’t the strength to resist them, happy to be carried along as the hours blur together.

On the third day, Bond is more alert and strong enough to get out of bed. A nurse removes his catheter and helps him to the bathroom, and after that he’s chivvied on hourly walks, shuffling like an old man, one hand on his wheeled IV stand, the other tucked against Q’s lean body.

Their talk is necessarily generic, carefully skirting the edges of sensitive details. He learns with little surprise that Q prefers cricket to rugby and with a gleeful astonishment that he’s a gearhead at heart, having spent years lovingly restoring a Triumph 2000 Roadster he’d inherited from his father.

Q, in turn, asks Bond for stories from his childhood at Skyfall, which Bond supplies with selective care, probing the past like a missing tooth, hoping not to hit an exposed root.

One evening, five days after Bond had first awoken, after a shared supper of spicy lentils and rice and garlicky naan, Q sets aside his tablet and says, “I’ve got to return to London.”

Bond had been expecting the pronouncement; indeed, he’d been surprised he’d gotten this much of Q’s time.

“What did you tell M?” Bond asks, the post-dinner lull in activity on the floor and the dim-lighted hush of evening offering them an illusion of privacy.

“He knows,” Q answers with a shrug.

Alarm spikes through him.

“And?” he asks, thinking this was, perhaps, a detail Q could have shared earlier.

Another elegant, dismissive shrug.

“There’s little he can do about it if he wants to retain my services, and you’re an old reprobate, so it’s par for the course where you’re concerned.” Q delivers this last with a warm curl at the corner of his mouth, and Bond curses his healing wound, which prevents him from leaning over to discover what that smile feels like against his own mouth.

As if reading Bond’s desire, Q rises from his chair to close the door and then returns to Bond’s side. He keeps his eyes deliberately on Bond as he drops the bedrail and then sits on the bed, one arm to either side of Bond’s body. He leans in, careful of Bond’s wounds, and kisses him with a thorough-minded focus that steals Bond’s breath.

Q’s mouth tastes of curry spices and masala tea, and he smells of hospital disinfectant, but to Bond he’s all Q, warm and pliant in his arms, which he wraps—at some expense of pain—around Q’s narrow waist.

Q resists Bond’s pull, breaking the kiss to say, “Now, 007, this is not what Dr. Wali meant by ‘mild exercise.’”

Bond thinks otherwise, but Q allows him only glancing, shallow kisses until Bond’s breathing evens out and he stops trying to coax Q into a more substantial embrace.

Eventually, Q sits up, mollifying Bond’s protest at the loss of contact by taking one of his hands in both of Q’s so that he can once again explore the terrain there.

Bond’s hands are evidence of his profession, the calluses and scars a living testament to the work he does. They’re a killer’s hands, and he feels a strange mixture of vulnerability and shame as Q touches him so intently and with such obvious affection.

He wants to pull away, but he can’t bring himself to lose that vital contact.

“Will you let me take you to dinner when I get home?” Bond asks. It seems a sudden question, but he’s been thinking about it for days—exotic dishes that tempt the senses, heady wine, Q’s bright eyes and sharp features and lush mouth bathed in candlelight.

Q cocks his head to one side and purses his lips as if he has to give the matter some thought.

Bond is almost entirely certain Q is playing the coquette, but fingers of unease curl through his stomach nonetheless. 

Bond tries backpedaling. “If you’d rather not, I’ll under—”

Q silences him with a bruising kiss, his tongue snaking between Bond’s teeth to lay thorough claim to Bond’s mouth.

When he’s let up for air at last, Bond’s breath is coming fast enough to pull against his wound. His lips are wet and tender, and he can feel heat in his face and along his throat and chest. He wants to pull Q down onto the bed with him and plunder the sinful red mouth, slip a hand beneath the staid button-down and cardigan and pinch his nipples until he pants Bond’s name against his neck. Strip him naked and swallow his cock and slide his fingers inside that clutching heat.

“I’d love to have dinner with you, Commander Bond,” Q says primly, but there is a wolfish heat in his eyes and a rakish tilt to his smile that are not remotely demure or retiring. His expression promises all manner of wickedness equal to the wildest excesses of Bond’s vivid imaginings.

Bond returns the smile with some heat of his own, validated beyond measure to see Q’s pupils dilate and heat paint rosy stripes across his fair cheeks.

Q slides off the bed, making a subtle adjustment that only serves to increase Bond’s smugness. For his own part, he’s tenting the hospital sheet, which Q notes with a pointed look and a raised eyebrow that does nothing to quell Bond’s urges.

Then he leans over and presses a long, firm kiss to Bond’s forehead.

“Heal swiftly, James,” he whispers, his warm breath against the shell of Bond’s ear sending shivers racing through him.

Bond catches Q’s wrist as he moves away, and Q turns to look at him, smile slipping from his face as he takes in whatever expression Bond is wearing.

He suspects it’s terror and jubilation in some awful combination.

“I love you,” Bond says, holding Q’s eyes, feeling his pulse spike against his fingers where he bracelets Q’s delicate, strong wrist.

Q’s mouth does something strange, and an equally strange expression flits through his eyes, and then he’s kissing Bond again and whispering intimacies against his mouth and along his jaw and against the pulse at his throat.

“I love you,” he says at last, clearly, once more driving wracking shivers through Bond. “Come home to me, James,” Q adds, standing up and moving toward the door with purpose, propping it open and then pausing there, hand on the frame, to repeat, “Come home,” over his shoulder before he’s gone.

That is one order James Bond will accept from his quartermaster without question or argument. 


End file.
